The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “No radio,” Soong complained and Hassan laughed a little at that, for always Soong preferred the easy way. “We will have to plant bugs,” Hassan told the team when they met after the first flight for debriefing, “to study their tongue, for we cannot hear them otherwise.”

  “They don’t have tongues,” Mizir said, though with him it was less complaint than fascination. “They make sounds, and they communicate with these sounds, but I don’t know how they make them.”

  “See if you can locate a body,” Hassan told the tele-pilots. “Perhaps there are morgues in the city,” pointing to the dark, smoky buildings that nestled distant against the bay of a cold, blue ocean. “Mizir needs to know how those people are put together.”

  “Tissue samples would be nice,” Mizir added, but he knew that was lagniappe.

  “An elementary school might have simple displays of their written language,” Bashir suggested. It was a standard checklist item for the assay of inhabited worlds, studied and carefully memorized in his training, but Hassan was pleased that the boy had remembered it.

  “Coal smoke,” Klaus Altenbach announced the next day after a drone had lasered the emissions of a building they believed to be a factory. “Or something carbonaceous. Peat? Not petroleum – those bunkers are with something solid filled. Technology is mid-nineteenth century equivalent,” he said, adding after a moment, “by the Common Era. I expect soon the steamships to come to those docks.” When Ladawan asked him from where these ships would come, he shrugged and told her, “There cannot be a horizon to no good purpose.”

  “It is a strange-looking city,” Mizir said, “although I cannot say why.”

  Yance Darby scratched his head. “Don’t look all that strange to me. ’Cept for the folk in it.”

  “They really are graceful,” Iman said of the indigenes, “once you grow accustomed to their strangeness. They are curlicues, filigrees of being. They must have art of some sort. Their buildings are intaglio – plain boxes, towers, but they have incised their every surface. Look for painting, look for sculpture.” And she set about to build a mannequin of the folk.

  “There’s so much to learn!” cried Bashir, overwhelmed by it all. Being young, he was easily overwhelmed; but a world is not something to be nibbled at. If one is to taste it at all, it must be swallowed whole; and yet that is impossible.

  “As well sip the Nile,” Mizir grumbled. “We could spend the rest of our lives here and not learn the first thing.”

  “Oh, we’d learn the first thing,” said Hassan. What worried him, and kept him awake into the night, was not the first thing they might learn, but the last.

  And so it went. The drones flew. Digital photographs downloaded into a mosaic map of landforms and soil types and vegetation. (Soong longed for a satellite in low orbit.) They sprinkled small ears about the city one night and harvested from them a Babel of sounds for the Intelligence to sort into phonemes and other patterns. (The Intelligence concluded that two languages were in use, and set itself to ponder the matter.) Mizir had for the time to content himself with creatures he could collect nearby. (“Alpine species,” he grumbled. “How representative are they of the coastal plains, the estuaries?”) Klaus discovered a railroad coming into the city on the far side. (“They had somehow to bring that coal in,” he joked, “and muleback I thought unlikely.”) The engines were steam-powered, with spherical boilers.

  Bashir wanted to name the world.

  Long-timers like Hassan and Soong and Mizir seldom bothered with such things. In time, the planet would speak and its name would be revealed. Until then, Hassan would simply call it the world. Still, when the team debriefed on the seventh day and Bashir broached the issue, Hassan did not stop the others from discussing it.

  They lounged on the cushions and ate dates and cheeses. Yance Darby, like Bashir recently graduated from the House of Gates, tossed pieces of food at the curious animals, causing them to scamper away, until Iman scolded him for it. That the crumbs were indigestible would not stop animals from swallowing, and who knew what would come of that? Soong sat a little apart, on high furniture at a table spread with printout maps, while he and Klaus and Ladawan traced geography and the road network on maps made of light. A phantom sphere floated in the air above the projector: all black, all unknown, save the little spot where they encamped – and they were not yet certain they had placed it properly.

  Hassan stood apart, outside the pavilion, under stars strange and distant. He held a cup of nectar in his hands and studied the MRI holograms of the local fauna that had been arranged on a display board, and he traced with a fingertip the clade lines that Mizir had guessed at. How strange, he thought, and yet how familiar, too. God was a potter and Nature was His knife. Everywhere life took form, He shaped it toward the same ends. And so there were things like mice, and things like hawks, although they were quite different in their details. The mouse had six legs, for one thing – its gait absorbing thereby many hours of Mizir’s close attention – and the hawk had claws on wingtip and feet and concealed, too, beneath its covert.

  Iman had constructed a mannequin of the sapients and had placed it by the entrance to the pavilion. Man or woman, no one knew, or even if such categories had meaning here. It stood shorter than a human and, at rest, assumed a curious sinusoid posture, like a cobra risen. In form, bilaterally symmetric, but possessed of four arms and two legs. Large lifting arms grew from mid-torso; smaller manipulators farther up. Claws tipped the one set, tentacles the other. The feet ended in claws, too, though these were stubbier. Mizir thought that the ancestral form had been six-legged, too, like so many of the scuttling things in the meadow, and the clawed lifting arms had evolved from the midlegs. “They are rodents,” he had said, arranging their image under that clade, “or what things like rodents might become.”

  “Yet the ‘rodents’ here are territorial,” Iman then told him, “which is very unrodentlike.”

  “Everything is the same the universe over,” Mizir had answered philosophically, “except that everything is different, too.”

  Atop the torso sat a structure shaped like an American “football” positioned for a kick-off. The skin was smooth, without hair or feathers, but with small plates, as if the creature had been tiled by a master mason. The creature’s coloring was a high cerulean, like the clear sky over the desert, though with darker patches on its back. But Mizir had spotted others in the throngs of the city – taller, slimmer, tending toward cobalt – which he thought might hail from the world’s tropics.

  It was a rich world. Diverse. There were many races, many tongues. There were alpine meadows and high prairies and coastal estuaries. How many eons deep was it? What lay over the curve of the horizon? How could they hope to grasp more than a meager slice? They would never know its history. They could hardly know its culture. Was that city below them – blackened with soot, lively with activity – the pinnacle of this world’s civilization? Or was it a cultural and technological backwater? Later, they would send the drones out on longer recon flights, but even that would only scratch at the surface. Men will come here for years, Hassan thought, perhaps for generations. And maybe then we will know a little.

  The creature in the model had no face.

  There were filaments that Mizir thought scent receptors; there were gelatin pools that were likely eyes. There was a cavity into which they had watched indigenes spoon food. But none of these features were arranged into a face. Indeed, its mouth was in its torso. The filaments waved above the football like ferns. The gelatin-filled pits were distributed asymmetrically around the headball, as were other pits, apparently empty, and a large parabolic cavity perversely set where a human mouth would be, although it was not a mouth at all.

  “They really are beautiful,” Iman said. She had come to stand by Hassan while the others chattered on about possible names for the planet. Hassan nodded, though in acknowledgement rather than agreement. He thought the indigenes looked scarred, pockmarked, twisted out of true. But that wa
s because his mind sought a greater symmetry of features than was offered.

  “Beautiful, perhaps; though they differ somewhat from the life forms Mizir has found up here,” he said. “I think they are interlopers. I think they have come from somewhere else, these people of yours. Perhaps from across that ocean.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed the possibility. “Soong says that the entire coastal plain came from somewhere else, and its collision with this continent raised the Misty Mountains.”

  “I keep seeing a face,” he said to her. “I know there isn’t one, but my brain insists on nostrils and ears. It seems to be smiling at me.”

  “Recognition template,” Iman said. “People have seen ’Isa, praise be upon him, in a potato; or Shaitan in a billow of smoke.”

  “It bothers me. We need to see these people the way they are, not the way we think they are.”

  “It was easier on Concannon’s World,” she told him. “The indigenes there looked like flowers.”

  “Did they?”

  “A little. They flew.”

  “Ah.”

  “Vapors jetted out their stems. They could only travel in short hops. But one doesn’t look for faces in a flower.”

  “And here I have always mistaken you for a lily.”

  Iman turned from him and made a show of watching the debate of the others. “Will you call this place Maklouf’s World? As team leader, it is your privilege.”

  Hassan shook his head. “I met Concannon once. He had an ego big enough for a world, but I’m not so vain as he. What do you think we should call this place?”

  Iman pursed her lips and adjusted the hijab under her chin. Her face was only a pale circle wrapped in a checkered cloth of red and white squares after the fashion of the Jordan Valley. “We should learn what the indigenes call it in their own tongue.”

  Hassan laughed. “They will call it ‘the world,’ and likely in hundreds of tongues, most of which we will never hear.”

  “Shangri-la!” said Bashir, loud enough that Hassan heard and turned toward him. Yance clapped his hands. “Perfect!” he agreed. “This place is sure enough a paradise.” Klaus nodded slowly, as did Ladawan and Khalid, the gate warden. Soong said nothing and glanced at Hassan.

  “No.” Hassan stepped inside the pavilion. “That is a dangerous name for a world, and dangerous because it sounds so safe. Every time we spoke it we would think this place safer yet.”

  “Well, isn’t it?” asked Iman.

  Hassan looked back over his shoulder and saw her run a hand along the muscled lifting arm of her statue. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen the surprise yet.”

  “Surprise?” asked Bashir. “What surprise is that?”

  Soong chuckled, but Hassan didn’t bother to answer. He continued to watch Iman stroke the statue.

  “Well, what would you call it?” Yance asked, making it sound a challenge.

  “It is your privilege, Hassan,” said Mizir.

  “If you must have a name for this world,” and Hassan looked again outside the tent, at the strange constellations above, at the expressionless, immobile “face” on the statue. “If you must have a name for this world, call it al-Batin.”

  Mizir stiffened, Bashir and Khalid exchanged glances. Iman smiled faintly. “It means, ‘The Hidden,’ ” she whispered to the others.

  “Not exactly,” Hassan added.

  “It is one of the Names of God,” Mizir protested. “That isn’t proper for a planet.”

  “It is fit,” Hassan said, “for as long as God hides its nature from us. After that . . . after that, we will see.”

  They called the city “East Haven” because of its position on a broad and deep estuary. A channel led from the Eastern Sea well into the mouth of a swift river – to embrace piers, docks, warehouses. This much they learned from high altitude sonar pictures from their drones. Why no ships nestled at those docks, the drones could not say.

  South and west of the city lay flatlands thick with greening crops, by which they guessed at a season much like late spring. The crops were broad and flat, like clover, but whether intended for the Batinites or for their livestock was unclear. Harrows and cultivators were drawn by teams of six-legged creatures the claws of whose mid- and hindlegs had nearly vanished into a hoof-like structure. Its forelegs stubbornly divided the hoof. Inevitably the team named them “horses,” although something in their demeanor suggested “oxen,” as well.

  One field was more manicured, covered by a fine ground-hugging carpet of waxy, fat-leafed, yellow-green plants, broken here and there with colorful flowers and shrubs arranged in decorative patterns. A sample of the “grass,” when crushed, gave forth a pleasant odor – somewhat like frankincense. The park – for such they assumed it was – spread across the top of a swell of ground and from it one gained a fine vista of the city, its port, and the Eastern Sea beyond. As the weather grew warmer, groups of Batinites ventured forth from the city to spend afternoons or sunsets there, spooning baskets of food into their gaping stomachs and watching their younglings leap and somersault through the chartreuse oil-grass.

  A road they called the Grand Trunk Road ran southwest from the city. The portions nearest the city had been paved with broad, flat stones, across which rattled a motley array of vehicles: carriages resembling landaus and hansoms, open wagons that Yance called “buck boards,” and freight wagons heavy with goods and strapped with canvas covers, whose drivers goaded their teams of oxen six-horses with enormously long whips.

  The Batinites themselves dressed in garb that ranged from pale dun to rainbow plumage, as task or mood dictated. They had a taste for beauty, Iman told the others, though for a different sort of beauty than Earth then knew, and she spent some of her free time adapting local fashion to the limbs and stature of humans – for there was a fad for matters alien in the cities of the Earth.

  One fork of the Grand Trunk Road branched northwestward toward a pass in the coastal range of which the Misty Mountain was a part. The road simplified itself as it receded, like a countryman shedding his urban clothes piecemeal as he fled the city: it became first hard-driven gravel then earth damped with a waxy oil, finally, as it began the long switchback up to the pass, rutted dirt. The drone they sent through the pass returned with images of a second, more distant city, smaller than East Haven and nestled in a rich farming valley. Beyond, at the limits of resolution, lay drier and more barren country and the hint of something approaching desert.

  “There is something energetic about those people,” Hassan observed. “They have a commotion to them, a busyness that is very like Americans. They are forever doing something.”

  “That is why the city seems so odd!” Iman exclaimed, a cry so triumphant that, following as it did so many weeks of study, seemed tardy in its proclamation, as if the sociologist had been paying scant attention ’til now.

  “Don’t you see?” she told them. “They are Americans! Look at the streets, how linear they are. How planned. Only by the docks do they twist and wander. That city did not grow here; it was planted. Yes, Mizir, you were right: They came from across the Eastern Sea.”

  A lively people, indeed. One of a pair of younglings capering in the park caromed off a six-cedar tree and lay stunned while its parents rushed to comfort it. Three parents, Iman noted, and wondered at their roles. “Or is the third only an uncle or aunt or older sibling?” Yet the posture of consolation is much the same on one world as another and tentacles could stroke most wondrous delicate.

  “They care for one another,” Iman told Hassan that evening in the pavilion.

  “Who does not?” he answered, rising from the divan and walking out into the night toward the vantage point from which they watched the city. East Haven was a dull orange glow. Oil from the chartreuse grass burned slowly in a hundred thousand lamps. Iman joined him and opened her mouth to speak, but Hassan silenced her with a touch to the arm and pointed to the shadow form of Bashir, who sat cross-legged on a great pillow and watched
with night-vision binoculars. Silently, they withdrew into Hassan’s pavilion, where Hassan sat on an ottoman while Iman, standing behind him, kneaded his shoulder muscles.

  “You’ve been carrying something heavy on these,” she said, “they are so hard and knotted up.”

  “Oh, nothing much. A world.”

  “Listen to Atlas.” She squeezed hard and Hassan winced. “Nothing you can do will affect this world. All you do is watch.”

  “People will come here for the wonderfall, for the oil-grass perfume, for the fashion and cut of their clothing. In the end, that cannot go unnoticed.”

  “What of it? To our benefit and theirs. One day we will greet them, trade with them, listen to their music and they to ours. It is only the when and the how that matter. I think you carry a weight much less than a world.”

  “All right. The eight of you. That is heavy enough.”

  “What, are Soong and Mizir children that you must change their diapers? Or I?”

  That conjured disturbing thoughts. He reached back over his shoulder and stilled her ministrations. “Perhaps you had better stop now.”

  “Am I so heavy, then?”

  “It’s not that. You scare me. I don’t know who you are.”

  “I am as plain as typeset. Children read me for a primer.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Do you wonder what is beneath the hijab? I could take it off.”

  The fire ran through him like a molten sword. He turned on his pillow and Iman took an abrupt step back, clasping her hands before her. “We’ve never been teamed before, you and I,” he told her. “What do you know about me?”

  “I know that Bashir is not so heavy as you think.”

  Hassan was silent for a while. “He grows no lighter for all your assurances.”

  “What can happen to him here?”

  “Very little, I think,” he admitted reluctantly. “And that is dangerous, for his next world may not be so safe.”